Layered 5d transition iridium oxides, Sr2(Ir,Rh)O4, are described as unconventional Mott insulators with strong spin-orbit coupling. The undoped compound, Sr2IrO4, is a nearly ideal two-dimensional pseudospin-1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet, similarly to the insulating parent compound of high-temperature superconducting copper oxides. Using polarized neutron diffraction, we here report a hidden magnetic order in pure and doped Sr2(Ir,Rh)O4, distinct from the usual antiferromagnetic pseudospin ordering. We find that time-reversal symmetry is broken while the lattice translation invariance is preserved in the hidden order phase. The onset temperature matches that of the odd-parity hidden order recently highlighted using optical second-harmonic generation experiments. The novel magnetic order and broken symmetries can be explained by the loop-current model, previously predicted for the copper oxide superconductors.

Sr2IrO4 is the archetype of the spin-orbit Mott insulator, but the nature of the metallic states that may emerge from this type of insulator is still not very well known. We study with angle-resolved photoemission the insulator-to-metal transition observed in Sr2Ir1−xRhxO4 when Ir is substituted by Rh (0.02 < x < 0.35). The originality of the Rh doping is that Ir and Rh, which are formally isovalent, adopt different charge states, a rather unusual and inhomogeneous situation. We show that the evolution to the metallic state can be essentially understood as a shift of the Fermi level into the lower Hubbard band of Sr2IrO4. The Mott gap appears quite insensitive to the introduction of up to ∼20% holes in this band. The metallic phase, which forms for x > 0.07, is not a Fermi liquid. It is characterized by the absence of quasiparticles, unrenormalized band dispersion compared to calculations and an ∼30-meV pseudo-gap on the entire Fermi surface. arXiv:1801.01459v2 [cond-mat.str-el]